by Karin Cox
Firelight made her eyes dark as thunderheads. “You first.”
I recited it quickly, and she nodded at my words, but when I was finished, she said, “It is not the same. This place your riddle speaks of, the place you thought was Thebes. Perhaps it is where Oedipus received his prophecy and from whence the riddle I mentioned to you came. I have been there only once before. It is nothing but a small village now, a place they call Kastri, built among the ruins. Sphinxes once lined the walks to the great temple. Their eyes were said to watch men for their intentions.”
“Ruins.” I felt great stones shifting heavily in my heart, like so many crumbling monuments. “If we must look at ruins then Skiathos, Skyros, Delos, and all the Cyclades might hide her, too, or Crete and Rhodos.” I watched the flames set a pinecone aglow. “Perhaps she is not even in Greece. What a task this is.”
“A task worth doing is always difficult.” Skylar fixed her gleaming irises on mine, but her eyes were sad. “Let me help you. The Greeks once knew Kastri as Delphi, from the ancient word for womb, although some called it omphalos—the navel of the world. It is a place of oracles, of mysteries. Perhaps it has something to tell us of your Sphinx.” She took my hand and squeezed it. Then, with a flap of her downy wings, she led me on toward the slopes of Mount Parnassus.
It was only once flight had stilled all conversation that I realized her sleight of hand. She knew my riddle, but I had yet to unravel hers.
CHAPTER FOUR
We found the mountain in the stark light of late afternoon, the green of Parnassus broken only by a cleft of blue between the twin hills of the Phaedriades and by the river sitting like a jewel between the mountain’s cleavage. Everywhere, wildflowers pushed yellows and pinks and tiny snowy heads of white up amid the rubble, and bees droned in a vacuum of time. I stared at the marble columns that propped up a small village and felt my eyes prickle at the impossibility of finding her stone here. Beyond the village, nothing was standing. If this were the womb Sabine’s riddle spoke of, it was more desolate even than poor, sweet Danette’s. I turned away.
“Amedeo.” Skylar turned me back toward the mountain, and we climbed it together. Murmurs and mutters accompanied our passage through the dirty streets. When we reached ruins halfway up the mountain, even Skylar drew her breath.
I heard her thoughts ring out, “Here it was that your mother’s vow was made.”
“My mother?”
Her mind cleaved shut; the door of a boudoir following an argument. I let it be.
We had flown half the night and half the day, and a great weariness soon overtook me. I longed for nothing more than to creep into a grove and dream, forgetting the tiring, fruitless journey to this place of Oedipus’s ancient doom, of ruins and of navels, of hopeless oracles. Perhaps, as I had once done, I might at least hear Sabine in a dream, or I might sleep more deeply in the mountain air.
But my legs continued to move involuntarily until I had overtaken Skylar and my half-closed eyes caught a movement in the trees ahead: a tawny blur, the true movements like the pouncing of a lion. I broke into a run, stumbling over marble in my path. As I righted myself, rubbing at my knees, I saw what it was that had tripped me. My heart lurched into my throat.
It was a head only, attached to the breast of a lion and to one great paw that was trapped beneath a fallen log. But it was unmistakably a Sphinx.
Gathering all my strength, I hefted the marble statue out from under the tree. The hindquarters and one front paw were still missing. The heaviness that gripped me was partly the weight of my disappointment, partly the added strength of life returning to the stone. It brought with it pink at the cheeks and lips and emerald green to heat the eyes, and then Sabine’s voice—that sweet, rich rumble—spoke my name.
I pulled back to look and Sabine’s eyes swiveled to fix me with a stare; theirs was the only movement in the otherwise stony face.
“You came then?” she said, in almost a purr.
“Yes.” I put the stone down and lowered myself to kiss the marble again, the cheeks and eyes and breasts, and the rounded domes that topped the sharp claws of her one paw, hoping to breathe more life into her. It did nothing. Only her eyes flashed; all else was cold.
“I found you.” I felt giddy at the words.
Sabine’s eyes seemed to burn with pain. “Some of me,” she said. “Am I still not whole?” Once more, the eyeballs swiveled in their sockets, as if to see.
“Ruins, my love.” I stroked the solid marble hair. “Surely you knew that when you hid yourself here.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “But after Gandler’s tortures, how I long to be whole again.”
If the stone could have, it might have shuddered beneath my hand.
“But you are mine again, and I am yours,” she continued. Her eyes focused on a point behind me, where Skylar stood watching in silence. “Should you still want me.”
Kissing the stone again, I mumbled, “You said I might save you this way, but how? You are still half stone.”
“That is another riddle. One few might answer,” she growled. “But you have saved me still. Loneliness is the most unbearable of all ends. This way, I may have your company, and if one day you find me in my ocean exile, I may be wholly yours again.”
She gazed behind me again, and I thought I saw her eyes narrow.
If she could, I thought, she might flex those mighty claws and roar at Skylar to leave us in solitude.
“She helped me find you.” I nodded in Skylar’s direction. “She said there is another riddle, an ancient oracle to awaken a Sphinx.”
A sigh escaped Sabine’s lips. “What good would it do to awaken me like this? Although perhaps this was always the part you loved the most.”
Despite the smile in her voice, my heart ached for her honesty and for the old hurts her heart carried. My wounds, I knew. I bent my lips to hers and kissed the marble again to silence her. “I love you, Sabine.”
Another sigh issued from the carved lips. “I doubt it not—only whom you may still love more.”
Thinking she meant Joslyn, I tried to hide the crease of sorrow that must have cut my brow.
“Sabine, I am here.” It was all I could say.
“Yes, you are, Ame,” she answered sadly. “But I am miles away.”
Then she was gone.
As quickly as she had appeared to me, the marble was inanimate and cold beneath my hand.
“I don’t understand!” I lifted the stone again, dragging it into my arms. “It did not work.”
Skylar approached tentatively to sit beside me. “It worked as well as it might. Look.” She pointed to the sky. “Night is upon us, and the anchorstone is only hers by day. The sea has stolen her from you temporarily.”
Once more, I thought, bitterly. Must I be content with a stone that speaks her thoughts?
Skylar bowed her head. “For now.”
It was not enough for me all of a sudden. Many times I had denied Sabine all of myself, and had denied myself her love, but now I wanted all of her.
“The riddle you know.” Even to my own ears, my voice was gruff, and I caught Skylar’s forearm tightly in my grasp. “The oracle you know about the Sphinx. You never told it to me. What is it? I must know it.”
She winced a little and rubbed her wrist when I let go. “Sabine is right, Amedeo. Consider it: should you revive her now, like this, she will be only part herself. She will have only one leg and no hindquarters. How would she live like that? How would she hunt? She would be a burden to you and a sorrow to herself. The only thing to do is to determine how we might rescue her from the sea, or to restore the anchorstone and then revive her. That is even if we can decipher the oracle I have heard.” She hesitated. “All these eons and no one has yet made a Sphinx’s anchorstone arise.”
“Others have tried?” I cried. “Tell me! Tell me now.” I examined the ground around me for the rest of the statue, for the haunches and legs and tail that so many times had turned me away from Sabine but that n
ow I longed for. But there was nothing but fragments of stone threaded through with wildflowers.
“I cannot.” Skylar helped me search, still wary of the stone head and the eyes that followed us both. We combed the bramble and brushes for anything resembling claw or tail tip.
“Tell me,” I demanded again.
Skylar straightened up and one hand wearily smoothed her hair behind her ear. “I cannot. To do so now would be a crime. I must seek approval.”
“Approval! From whom?” I kicked at a pinecone, which skittered across the stony path. “You follow me and yet refuse to tell me why. You help me find Sabine but refuse to tell me how to save her! Approval from the Maker?”
“No.” Skylar stopped and stared into my face. Her face was flushed and her lips pursed. “From the Council of Paleon,” she said eventually. “If you want to know the oracle, you must ask them yourself.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The water below had turned to blue ink lapping land that was a low, scrubby jungle of rock when Skylar eventually turned to me and said, “We are nearly there.”
“You have not yet told me where there is.”
“Silvenhall,” she said, as if there had never been a question. Without waiting for more questions, she surged on ahead of me, her face turned away from the Wind’s bite.
Her answer, like her manner, annoyed me. Despite my need to hear the riddle, it had taken all of Skylar’s insistence to move me from Sabine’s anchorstone, or the little of it we had found. I had searched for hours. Even in the darkness, my frantic hands had sifted rock, seeking the glint of marble. I had wanted to be there in the morning, when Sabine might return to me for the day, but even more, I wanted to know how to awaken her forever.
Some part of me knew Skylar was right: if I brought Sabine back as she was, she would hate me for it. Sabine would count herself even more a beast than she had before. What would be left for her if she could not hunt, could not run, could not fend for herself?
The dwarf, Kettle, the stumps of his tortured legs swathed in bandages, came to my mind. I had left him to die, he who had helped me. I could not leave Sabine so helpless as that. It would destroy her—destroy us both. But still I had begged Skylar to tell me there and then.
“To learn the riddle, you must come with me,” Skylar had insisted. “Sabine’s anchorstone will be safe here until you return. That is why she hid it here in the first place.”
She was right, I knew. Gandler, the monster, was dead, and I did not think Beltran would care enough to torment me now that Joslyn’s love was lost to us both. It was likely he thought Sabine would remain forever in a watery grave somewhere in the Caribbean.
Skylar’s voice when she spoke was soft with sympathy. “It is not just the Council. There is something I want you to see, something that must see you, also. You are not alone, Amedeo, not unless you wish to be.”
But I felt more lonely than ever. How long would it take for the encasing metal they had trapped Sabine in to be lapped away by seawater? How long would it take me to hunt down Beltran and tear his heart from his body, to set aflame the vampire brethren of the world?
“This thing you cannot do alone, Amedeo. And you should not.”
I bit my tongue, but my mind retorted with, “Who would help me? You, who would not lift a hand to save them then, or to save me?”
“I am sorry.”
I sensed the truth in it.
“I have my own ... mission ... my own wishes. I could not save them for you, not even if you would have let me.”
She was right—again. I had never asked Sabine to help me, neither had I asked Josyln. I remembered my fear when I had first seen Skylar’s face, shining in the crowd at Gandler’s Circus of Curiosities. I would never have involved her in my private war with Beltran. I would never have introduced her to Gandler, or asked her to fight on my behalf, even if she hadn’t been just a will-o-the-wisp in the darkness, or a beautiful face above a scarlet cape at a circus.
The earth was chalky where we set down, and I fell forward and sprawled on landing. I had not expected sympathy from Skylar, nor did I receive any. She laughed—a clear, uncomplicated sound, and when she reached out a hand to help me up, I ignored her.
“I had thought you a gentleman.”
I found I was ashamed of myself. However apathetic she had been about the fate of my friends, I could tell she was not unkind.
“I am tired,” I said aloud, by way of apology. “Exhausted.”
“Sometimes you must learn to take the hand that is offered you.”
“Even when it is offered too late.”
Ignoring my petulance, she dropped her hand to her side. “Come,” she said. Her feet left dainty prints in the gray-white dust of the hillside.
She had said we were nearly there, but I followed her for miles on foot, wending through dense forest. Sometimes it seemed as if we had backtracked or as if we set off on a tangent, and when she stopped to enable me to catch up, she looked behind for any others who might follow. Whether she heard me mentally cursing her, I was unsure, but she said nothing or had hidden her mind.
The viridian of pines, cypress, and chestnut, and the duller khaki of olives studded the stark landscape. The place crackled with light and with loneliness; it felt as terse as I did and even more ancient. My footfalls were the only sound; even the call of shrike or thrush was absent. If we are being followed, it must be by fox alone, I thought, wondering how Skylar was so light of foot that I could not hear her ahead of me.
“Or bat,” came her thought as she stopped again and examined the treetops and the sky above.
Occasionally, I caught her up and followed closely for a time, mesmerized by the swing of her hair as she passed through the trees. After another hour, we came to a rocky rise that bristled with pines.
“Come,” she said again and rose into the air. “You have had time to recover, and we are almost there. You are too weak, too vulnerable if we met with enemies. When we arrive, you may rest.”
I cursed her again, but she was already high above me, winging on towards mountains in the distance. With little choice, I followed on aching wings.
When charcoal smokestacks of mountains jutted up around us, she flew on with increased vigor. My wings railed against the flight, but I followed her ever upwards, past monasteries perched on the cliffside, until we came to a stack distant enough from the stilted chapels to allow some privacy. Skylar fluttered down into a bare patch amid a swatch of forest.
As soon as my feet touched the ground behind her, she turned back to me. “Amedeo...”
For the first time, I detected something other than calm in her voice.
Her brow furrowed. “This may not be what you expect.”
“Do not trouble yourself. The riddle you promised me is all I expect from you. You have given me little reason to expect more. It is lucky for you that life has taught me to expect little.” Grief quickly reminded me it was a lie: I had expected everything of Joslyn and Sabine, everything and more. I had expected them to share my love.
“I will never do that.”
Her thought surprised me. When she spun quickly on her heel, I knew she had not anticipated that I would hear it.
“Perhaps you should expect more from me.” I willed her to hear me. She did not answer for some time as I followed her up the rocky hillside.
Finally, she said aloud with a touch of coldness, “I expect nothing.”
“And everything.” Her thoughts followed.
I caught myself wondering on it for a moment, and then my thoughts, and my mouth, fell silent.
CHAPTER SIX
The hill sloped away into a boulder-studded glade. Skylar glanced back, reassuring herself we were not being followed, and made her way down to where plains met a horizon ringed by mountains. Soon, a cavern yawned from the intersection of the largest boulders, and Skylar slipped through it into the inky coolness. Something prickled my skin, some fear or foreboding, but I heard her voice in my head: “Do n
ot be afraid. Silvenhall is home to me.”
Again, I followed.
Glimmering phosphorescence ran like a vein through the rock, highlighting Skylar’s shining hair and her shape, willow slender, moving through the gloom. I followed her through the darkness toward a bright light at the cavern’s end.
When she stepped out into daylight, the light of her skin and hair was blinding, brighter than electrum. Her radiance was enhanced by the glow emanating from hundreds of other ethereal beings.
Cruxim, all—like myself. My guts spooled at the thought.
The Maker had been right: I was never alone. But the way they all stopped and stared made me feel more alone than ever. How had it been that I had not known about them? How had I wandered solitary for so long?
Most were in formation—some kind of battle training—marching in columns of twelve, men and women together, their arms linked, each gripping the forearm of the Cruxim to their right. Their diamantine effect was amplified by beaten silver mail beneath embroidered cloaks. Metal guards shone at shin and wrist, and an embossed shield slung over each left forearm enabled them to form a phalanx of impenetrable, armored argent. They moved toward me, fixing eyes that resembled slivers of gray-green glass upon me. All radiated beauty, but only one stepped forward to greet Skylar.
“Skylar, what have you done?”
The Cruxim’s voice was sharp in my head, like a blade through my brain.
“He is not welcome here!” Instinctively, he put a hand to his neck, reaching for a quiver set upon his back.
“Stay your hand, Daneo,” Skylar spoke aloud. “Let me explain.”
More Cruxim stepped out of formation to surround us and for a second I thought he would not listen. A wing of tawny hair fell around his handsome yet pinched face when he finally nodded. “Speak then, for we are curious. Why would a daughter of Silvenhall bring the accursed before us?”
“You know as well as I,” she retorted, her chin up.
I recognized rebellion in her tone. Fragile as she looked, there was power in Skylar, and all who stood before me knew it.
